Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Saturday, 1 November 2014

Staging the Secession: the revolutionary career of Alfred Roller

[From
OPERA, November 2014, pp. 1360-5]

Alfred Roller

Max Mell’s
brief 1922 biography of Alfred Roller tells us that when asked as a child what
he wanted to be when he grew up, Roller would reply, ‘someone who’s allowed to
go backstage’. It seems like an almost comically modest ambition for the
artist-turned-stage-designer who would prove to be so significant a figure in
early-20th-century Austro-German theatre and opera. Inevitably, though, Roller
stands in the shadow of two great musical collaborators: Mahler, with whom he
helped create a brief golden age at the Vienna Hofoper at the beginning of the
century; and Richard Strauss, for many of whose operas he provided important
designs, and with whom he shares a 150th anniversary this year (Roller was born
in Brno on 2 October 1864).

In
retrospect, it’s easy to see Roller as the figure that the Haus am Ring was in desperate
need of to provide a visual complement to the musical reforms Mahler—appointed
its director in 1897—had introduced. The son of a distinguished graphic artist
and teacher, Roller showed an interest in art from an early age. He moved to
Vienna in 1884 and, respecting his father’s desire that he take a suitably
professional course in his life, first read law and art history at the
university, before being drawn to courses in painting and architecture at the
Akademie der bildenden Künste. He was a founder member of the Viennese
Secession, and co-editor of its official journal, Ver Sacrum, for which
he provided illustrations—including for the cover of its first issue. He joined
the staff of the Vienna School for Applied Arts (the Kunstgewerbeschule) in
1900 and succeeded Carl Moll as the Secession’s president in 1902.

The next
important chapter of Roller’s artistic life began that same year, when he masterminded
the Secession’s famous Beethoven exhibition, built around Max Klinger’s vast
Beethoven Monument. Another of the exhibition’s main features was Klimt’s Beethovenfries
(still exhibited in the Secession building) and Roller’s own fresco Die
sinkende Nacht took up position behind Klinger’s Beethoven, its apparently
explicit Wagnerian overtones undermined only slightly by the fact that opposite
it was another, less overtly Tristanesque fresco, Der werdende Tag (‘The
Dawning Day’), by Adolf Böhm.

Plans to
have Mahler contribute by conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and the Hofoper
chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony foundered on what—according to Mahler’s
own account—was the mercenary attitude of the orchestra (in typical Viennese
fashion, it turned into a scandal, accompanied by much claim, counter-claim,
speculation and finger-pointing in the press).

There are
contradictory accounts of the first meetings between Mahler and Roller, which
took place around this time—one involving Roller sketching designs for Tristan
on a café tablecloth, another involving a Tristan design Roller was
supposed to have exhibited. Most likely is that the two men met at Moll’s
house, and that the conversation led quickly onto Wagner in general, and Tristan
in particular. It was the last of the great Wagner works that Roller had got to
know, and he had been gripped by it like no other, never missing a performance
at the Hofoper, even if, he claimed, he tended to sit through them with his
eyes closed.

Roller was
critical of the Hofoper’s existing design team of Anton Brioschi and Heinrich
Lefler; Mahler seems to have had little admiration for them either. Brioschi,
though a fine artist, was an establishment figure who had followed in his father
Carlo’s footsteps at the Hofoper and honed his style under Simon Quaglio
(responsible for the scenery of the inadequately old-fashioned Munich premieres
of Rheingold and Walküre). Brioschi was increasingly out of
fashion in a Secessionist Vienna keen to unleash the full power of Wagner’s
works; Hermann Bahr, always a reliable barometer of the city’s prevailing
artistic attitudes, said that he ‘painted bad designs to perfection’.

Lefler was
a co-founder of the Hagenbund (an alternative artistic movement to the
Secession, but one with similar aims) and brother-in-law of Joseph Urban, who
would later became an important stage designer in New York. But although Lefler
certainly had some vitalizing influence after he joined the Hofoper as
Brioschi’s assistant in 1900, it seems to have been limited. Mahler gave the
responsibility for the designs of the new Tristan to Roller, and did so
straight after that first meeting.

Both Mahler
and Roller, it seems, were well versed in the writings of the Swiss theorist Adolphe
Appia, who argued for a theatre not of illusion but one of suggestion—an
‘Andeutungsbühne’ rather than a ‘Illusionsbühne’, which would rely on and
exploit the viewer’s imagination rather than restrict and restrain it with
literalism. As Patrick Carnegy notes in his Wagner and the Art of the
Theatre, Mahler reportedly welcomed Roller’s idea of ‘a stage on which
everything is only intimated’.

As with
many of Roller’s designs, it’s difficult in our seen-it-all-before, post-Regietheater age to appreciate quite how revolutionary the Mahler-Roller
Tristan was—each act, after all, showed the settings Wagner’s score
specified. But, as Carnegy points out, only two decades after Wagner’s death it
was almost unheard-of to create a production that didn’t take as its starting
point Wagner’s own Munich production of 1865, or even the more questionably
‘authoritative’ Bayreuth staging of 1886, realized by his widow.

It was also
a production that sought at every point to reflect and complement the mood of
the score, and one that used lighting as it had never been used before, as an
expressive tool—even almost, in the symbolic use of colour, as an expressive
language in and of itself, rather than as simply a means of illuminating
painted backcloths. Props and scenery were, for once, three-dimensional, a fact
that offered, through the possibilities of shadow, yet further expressive
opportunities.

Further
important productions of the Mahler era included a staging of Wolf’s Der
Corregidor in 1903, as well as an architecturally imposing Fidelio in
1904, the massiveness of whose sets (and resultant lengthy scene changes)
arguably played a part in Mahler’s decision to insert the Leonore No. 3 overture
before the final scene—a tradition that persists in Vienna to this day. The
1906 production of Don Giovanni was, if anything, a bolder experiment,
in which four ‘Roller Towers’, as they were dubbed, were fixed, two on each
side of the stage, framing the action and serving multiple purposes while the
scenery behind was changed.

It was an
idea that allowed unprecedentedly swift scene changes but which was also in
part motivated by an ‘authentic’ desire to reconstitute the 18th-century idea
of the two-part stage—all but banished in modern theatres of the time—with the
‘proscenium’ the domain of the principals, the stage itself reserved for the
ballet, the chorus, the special effects and the extras.

There were
further innovations for a new Rheingold and Walküre—the former
performed, for once, without an interval, the latter uncut and with a design
for the Walkürenfels that was strongly reminiscent, Carnegy has suggested, of
Appia’s own design for Act 3 of that opera. The simple choreography Roller
encouraged for Iphigénie en Aulide in 1907—the final Mahler-Roller
production—showed once more the concern shared by both men that stage action
should reflect primarily the music, creating opera performance not as a
disconnected agglomeration of elements but, rather, as something approaching
the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

The Ring
project never reached full fruition, with Mahler resigning at the start of
the 1907-8 season; Roller, without Mahler there, lost control over the
remaining instalments. Still, he produced designs for several new productions,
including the first Vienna Elektra in 1909, the year that Roller
returned to teaching, taking up the directorship of the Kunstgewerbeschule.

But as his
close working relationship with Mahler was coming to an end, so began another
chapter—that with the triumvirate that would, a decade later, set up the
Salzburg Festival: Strauss, Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt. Roller’s activities had
for some time also included work in the spoken theatre, and he had designed
important pre-war productions for Reinhardt, including the director’s massive
1911 productions of Oedipus the King, The Oresteia and Jedermann
in Berlin’s Zirkus Schumann. It was in that same year that Roller provided
the designs for the 1911 Dresden premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, which Reinhardt,
joining the creative team late in the day, had been instrumental in
successfully bringing to the stage in the face of the internal politics of the
Semperoper.

Unusually,
those iconic, much-reproduced designs also became part of the work itself, part
of the publisher’s property and—in an interesting development for a designer
whose work is often seen as a precursor to Regietheater—an essentially
inalterable element for anyone wishing to perform the work themselves, at least
in the first few years of the opera’s existence. But if Roller’s work on Rosenkavalier
was deemed a success, Hofmannsthal, in particular, was dissatisfied with
his designs for Die Frau ohne Schatten, premiered in 1919 in an
Operntheater (the Viennese house was briefly without either of its prefixes,
‘Hof-’ or ‘Staats-’) under the control of Strauss and the conductor Franz
Schalk. It lacked the necessary Baroque theatrical magic, he said, even if, as
with Der Rosenkavalier, the librettist and the designer had worked in
detail on a Regiebuch—a ‘direction book’—to help fix the idea of how the
work should be performed.

The team behind the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier

Roller had
helped create the aesthetic languages that defined these two
Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas, and was involved in important, technically
brilliant postwar Viennese stagings of Palestrina (1918), Die
Gezeichneten (1920) and Die tote Stadt (1921). He also provided
costumes for the magnificent first Viennese performances (glamorously
double-cast and conducted by Toscanini) of Turandot in 1928. The
‘director’—inasmuch as modern parlance can be applied to the differently
defined roles of the time—on that occasion was Lothar Wallenstein, with whom
Roller also collaborated on important Viennese Verdi stagings in the late
1920s.

Maria Nemeth as Turandot in the Roller-designedproduction in Vienna

A brief
sketch like this of so long a career inevitably misses out some important achievements:
a Shakespeare cycle at Vienna’s Burgtheater in the early ’20s, for example, the
first Viennese performance of Salome (at the Volksoper in 1910), and
extensive work at the Salzburg Festival. But one final production, at a rival festival,
deserves mention: the 1934 Parsifal at Bayreuth, which, after much
wrangling, replaced Wagner’s own 1882 staging. Politics bubbled around the new
production with wholly predictable ferocity, with hard-line Wagnerians,
determined to preserve the Master’s staging, coming up against Hitler’s own desire
for a new production; and Roller—despite, in the words of Frederic Spotts,
being ‘ill and in his cups’—was given the responsibility. In the end, he
produced a staging ‘little different from the sacrosanct original’.

Hitler’s
reasons for choosing Roller were complex, but had their roots in the designer’s
time in Mahler’s Hofoper. The 19-year-old Hitler, a budding artist who greatly
admired Roller’s Wagner productions, had, through a series of acquaintances,
managed to gain an invitation to visit the great designer, to show him some of
his work. However, as Brigitte Hamann has outlined (in Hitler’s Vienna: A
Dictator’s Apprenticeship, Oxford University Press, 1999), when the day
came, the young man bottled it.

That
meeting that never happened offers a tantalizing suggestion of a path that
history never took, and it’s unclear—without burrowing into the archives—what Roller
thought of that young artist’s subsequent choice of career. It was also lucky,
in a way, that he didn’t live to see the horrors that would come of it. Roller
himself died in 1935; his son Ulrich, also an important designer, who worked
on, among other things, the first Viennese performance of Strauss’s Daphne
in 1940, wasn’t so lucky, perishing on the Eastern Front in late 1942.

Much of Roller’s achievement is difficult to
gauge today: the impressions of his productions that can be pieced together
only from eye-witness accounts and extant sketches and photographs are
inevitably imperfect and unsatisfactory, and the importance of design and the
visual aspect of opera was not, a century ago, deemed as central as it is now.
Some, too, might regret the developments he helped pioneer, and the boundaries
he helped break down. In the anniversary year that he shares with a composer
with whom he worked so closely, though, it’s perhaps time to remember how
important he was in revolutionizing the visual side of the multi-faceted art
form that is opera.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

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Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.